IBM Business Process Manager on Mobile

There is an increasing demand and need for BPM suites to extend its capabilities to Mobile platforms. IBM Business Process Manager does not provide out of the box features for Mobile applications; however IBM Business Process Manager does have a REST API which can be used for Mobile communication. The REST API provided by IBM Business Process Manager utilizes the Web API which has been discarded from TeamWorks 6. The REST API still exists and could prove to be useful too, but it is getting deprecated. Also, IBM Business Process Manager recommends all process data access through its JavaScript API from TeamWorks 7 and it extends for WebSphere editions too. This article aims at providing an approach for enabling mobile users communicate with IBM Business Process Manager.

Exposing IBM Business Process Manager API as RESTful services

Applications built on IBM Business Process Manager lives on intranet (corporate domain), which means a browser from a mobile phone with internet cannot be used to access IBM Business Process Manager portal on corporate domain. Even if an organization has exposed IBM Business Process Manager portal over internet, the usability feature of the portal will be hampered by the mobile browser. This boils down to the fact that dedicated mobile applications should be built for IBM Business Process Manager specific tasks. This article provides an approach to enable mobile app communication on platforms like Android, iOS and Symbian from IBM Business Process Manager and is not a tutorial to build the mobile application itself. A subsequent post would be published on building an Android application for IBM Business Process Manager tasks.

Some of the common activities users would wish to perform from their mobile application would be like, initiate a process, add comments to a process instance, complete a task, etc. One common protocol mobile apps use to perform for cross platform communication is Java Script Object Notation (JSON). Mobile application tool kits and SDK already have lot of libraries to write and read JSON. Choosing some other protocol other than JSON/HTTP would mean, that a lot of logic for mobile apps needs to written from scratch.

The activities required to be performed from a Mobile application needs to have corresponding services in IBM Business Process Manager which can throw JSON so that mobile apps can consume. So for instance, an activity like Create Bank Account process, if needs to be invoked from a mobile application, the mobile app would invoke a REST IBM Business Process Manager service (General System Service), which in turn would trigger the Create Bank Account process. IBM Business Process Manager has a JSON toolkit which has very limited capabilities and lot of other functions needs to be built to make it as a complete JSON toolkit. There are different approaches in which a IBM Business Process Manager service can be converted into a Restful service.

• Use JSON toolkit provided by IBM Business Process Manager support.
• Use REST API provided by IBM Business Process Manager support. REST API extensively uses Web API to access process data. As a word of caution, Web API is deprecated from TeamWorks6.
• Build a stand-alone REST services with Spring3, where the stand-alone REST services would be consumed by the Mobile apps and the REST services would invoke IBM Business Process Manager services via SOAP based Webservices.
• Another deviation from the 3rd option can be instead of REST services invoking IBM Business Process Manager services via SOAP based Webservices; REST services can invoke exposed URLs from IBM Business Process Manager. But, exposed URLs from IBM Business Process Manager are limited to executing a process and completing a task.

The 3rd option seems like a more reasonable and scalable option since, a lot of mobile app features can be incorporated in house. Moreover Spring3’s REST capabilities can be fully leveraged for JSON generation. The weird thing with this approach is that it uses REST services to invoke SOAP based services.



In real world, mobile apps are outside corporate domain network, it is imperative to expose the REST based services in internet. So a robust authentication mechanism is required to secure the REST based services over internet. Spring security and Spring Android security can be fully utilized with OAuth mechanism to fulfill any security constraints.

This article will be supplemented with two others posts, one for Developing Spring3 REST services which would expose IBM Business Process Manager Mobile API functions, and other post for building an Android app for IBM Business Process Manager tasks.